The Forgotten Man

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation.

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Publisher's Summary

It's difficult today to imagine how America survived the Great Depression. Only through the stories of the common people who struggled during that era can we really understand how the nation endured. In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes offers a striking reinterpretation of the Great Depression. Rejecting the old emphasis on the New Deal, she turns to the neglected and moving stories of individual Americans, and shows how they helped establish the steadfast character we developed as a nation.

Shlaes also traces the mounting agony of the New Dealers themselves as they discovered their errors. She shows how both Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt failed to understand the prosperity of the 1920s and heaped massive burdens on the country that more than offset the benefit of New Deal programs.

The real question about the Depression, she argues, is not whether Roosevelt ended it with World War II. It is why the Depression lasted so long. From 1929 to 1940, federal intervention helped to make the Depression great, in part by forgetting the men and women who sought to help one another. The Forgotten Man, offers a new look at one of the most important periods in our history, allowing us to understand the strength of the American character today.

This is absolutely one of the best books on the subject of the Great Depression. The depth that Ms. Shlaes go to in dealing with such subjects as the Schecters, and the personalities of the "brain-trust" and other details is superb.
I'm a former high school teacher and this is one of the books I recommend most often to my former students.

This book really explains what happened in the Great Depression as individuals viewed what was happening.. this is a history that I did not get from any school I attended and I was a history major at an ivy league college.. a very interesting listen.. puts some flesh and bones on this period in our history.. strongly recommend this book.

This is the Great Depression as you've never seen it. Even though you know what is coming, you feel the stress and fear of an oncoming train wreck! And I could see many of the same things happening now. I couldn't put it down!

While some say this is revisionist history, many of the facts tell a different story. It shows why Capitalism is one of the few economic systems that truly works, whether we like it or not. The comments about "unpatriotic" weathly americans can apply to every person in America and what we all do. Most people are focused on themselves and therefore the economic system of a country needs to flourish when this happens. That is why Capitalism has been successful and why failed Socialistic economies like Russia have moved to it. In a broader sense, this book shows why redistribution of wealth does not work. This is an outstanding book at this time in history.

This is a must read for anyone who wishes to understand how government can ruin markets by misunderstanding how they work. The knee-jerk reaction of Washington to market correction is what make the great depression last so long and has put us on this trajectory of dependence and welfare! AWSOME BOOK that dispationaatly states the facts!

I find the book objective in its presentation providing information (facts)that provide insight and background for what FDR and his people did to this country and the results of their actions. A reader will certainly come away with a better understanding of what the present administration's agenda is.

Ms Shlaes' 'Forgotten Man' is as forgotten today as back then, and in greater numbers than ever. Regrettably, fewer and fewer people are alive today to recall the great depression for the rest of us, and so this book is the best antidote to our collective amnesia.

The Forgotten Man is exceedingly fair and balanced, and to my mind neither political party comes off well, well-intentioned though they may have been.

Don't let those who snubbingly call the book "revisionist' fool you. It is history, plain and simple, only history that most Americans alive today neither recall nor wish to recall. The intellectual elite of the past are the same as those we have experimenting on us today. Only, back then they didn't have a great depression to learn from, making inexcusable the actions of today's brain trusts.

The numerous biographical sketches bring the times alive and making the book a double winner, both an excellent collection of fascinating biography as well as history.

I found the book a very quick listen, and now every headline I read in the paper, every piece of legislation that is passed, and all the exact same rhetoric we hear our leaders exhort takes on a whole new meaning.

The book begins with great promise as it takes a new look at how FDR's policies did more to prolong the Great Depression than bring about recovery. However, it quickly gets lost among art collections, boat trips, government photography programs and the life stories of a cast of thousands that is impossible to follow in an audio book. I personally would have preferred a smaller cast and more focus on the economic principles that are all but glossed over. By the end, there are too many storylines to follow and they are not brought back together to form a coherent or satisfying conclusion.

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